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Employee 2-4601 wrote:I genuinely feel that people who don't like Lisp probably haven't spent enough time with Lisp.

This is fair... however, I could also say that I genuinely feel that people that don't like Dwarf Fortress haven't spent enough time with Dwarf Fortress, and my saying that would be equally valid - and perhaps even true. But someone saying Dwarf Fortress has a terrible interface is also justified in saying so, because it does in fact have a terrible interface... even though it's very fun.

Employee 2-4601 wrote:I genuinely feel that people who don't like Lisp probably haven't spent enough time with Lisp.

I could never claim to be an expert in it, but I did use (among other flavors) GCLISP for a minor project.

Maybe a better claim to fame was that I was the one who found the dusty punched card deck containing an instance of LISP for IBM MVS, which a friend -- who later became Dean of the Computer Science department where we went to school -- used for his Master's thesis project.

Employee 2-4601 wrote:I'll admit that TECO scares me, so I think I'm glad I never used that.

That is wise; TECO really was as insane as everyone says it was.

I used it for a while when I had a DEC PDP-11/04 in my bedroom (don't ask). I stopped using it after it corrupted the original Zork (the one that was later split into three MS-DOS games), even though I hadn't even edited the game code.

TECO was just a variety of disasters waiting to happen.

Employee 2-4601 wrote:BRIEF sounds interesting; I've not heard of that before. Ah, I see it was a DOS,OS/2,Windows thing. Apparently crisp-mode provides "CRiSP/Brief editor" key bindings in Emacs (but presumably nothing more than that).

BRIEF's default key-bindings setup was one of the reasons for its popularity. Rather than being modal like EMACS/vi, each function in BRIEF had its own keycommand, with the most common ones being a regular key and the rest using a combination of the Ctrl or Alt key. This meant you didn't have to remember (or look to see) what mode you were in; everything was immediate.

That was one of the contributors to the "direct from brain into file" feeling I mentioned when I was banging out code. BRIEF really was beautifully designed. It's why my editor of choice remains ZEUS, which was a later-PC clone of BRIEF -- it doesn't have the scripting feature, but otherwise it's got the feel of BRIEF with a lot of snazzy modern features added.

(BTW, while I'm not a fan of modal systems myself, including in text editors, of course I understand that people can train themselves to be proficient using them. On the other hand, there were people who claimed that the RPN used in HP calculators was somehow superior to the common-sense infix notation used by Motorola calculators, so I suppose there's no accounting for taste. )

((And to be extra-clear, I'm just poking a bit of geezergeek fun here. I don't begrudge anyone their editor of choice.))

Silverware wrote:
Try c9.io if you need to test things. :V Basically a tiny VM you get some control over :3

Hmm...thanks! I'll take a look. But on first glance, it seems like it needs more setup. Cool thing for repl.it is when you want to test out like...1 function. Just something that came up your mind and you're not sure if it works. It's done in a few seconds. For me, c9.io looks like a tool to test large bits of code without the hassle of a compiler or the need to set up a web server to test web-dev related things. Or am I wrong with my first glance?

Basically that, C9 is good for smallish projects.
repl is good for instant gratification of small chunks of code. Most of what you can do there can be done in a node.js terminal. Or the browser console on any random webpage.

Didn't know you can test C#, C++, Python or things like that in a console of my web browser...

Flatfingers wrote:... found the dusty punched card deck containing an instance of LISP for IBM MVS ... had a DEC PDP-11/04 in my bedroom

It's probably been said before, but it occurs to me that this really isn't a typical computer gaming community (or surely not for a new game, at any rate).

I dunno.... (waits for Idunno to appear)

Flatfingers's First Law of Online Presence: No matter what the subject, there is always someone who knows more about it than you do. And that person will appear as soon as you post a comment on this subject.

So I naturally assume there are plenty of people on this forum who were computing before I was. It's probably only a matter of time before The Ghost of Seymour Cray shows up to talk about what it was like to toggle in an operating system of his own design on the front panel of a computer he designed... in octal... from memory.

Something about the internet being too distracting and ruining their work ethic, so they were cutting of themselves from internet for 3 years.
I assume for finishing high school or college or uni or so, but not sure.

Dinosawer wrote:Something about the internet being too distracting and ruining their work ethic, so they were cutting of themselves from internet for 3 years.
I assume for finishing high school or college or uni or so, but not sure.